For Farewell! (2011), Elizabeth Moran collected, printed, and framed a series of "good bye" emails written and sent employees who had either quit, fired, or laid off from various companies between 2011 and 2008. As she writes on her website, "Though the sending of these email are discouraged, employees view them as their last chance to reach out to thank or disparage those who will remain in the company." This artwork is a stridently simple, yet powerful, documentation of the 2008 financial crisis: these ephemeral, epistolary traces are both tragic and comic, in an Office Space slash Margin Call sort of way.

Born in 1984, Moran received her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Photography + Imaging in New York and is currently pursuing her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (full disclosure: I teach there). Since Farewell!, Moran has been working on several new projects. One of the most intriguing is entitled The Armory, an ongoing photo-documentation of the "ever-changing sets of the BDSM pornography company Kink.com". In these photos, sexual activity is both alluded and evoked, but never presented. The performance is always imagined, but never shown. The Armory is BEFORE SEX. The Armory is AFTER SEX. The Armory is "SAFE FOR WORK". The backdrops include interiors of suburban homes, meat lockers, living rooms, restrooms, and generic work spaces. These simulated spaces are both familiar and bizarre - in a word, uncanny. Like the virtual settings of The Sims, they await to be furnished with avatars and animated with sexual performances from a repertoire of clichés. After all, fantasies provide the ontological texture of reality. That is, there cannot be "real" lovemaking without pornography. Interestingly, Slavoj Žižek suggests that pornography is inherently tragic. As he argues in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology:

"Pornography is, and it is, a deeply conservative genre. It's not a genre where everything is permitted. It's a genre based on a fundamental prohibition. We cross one threshold, you can see everything, close ups and so on, but the price you pay for it is that the narrative with justifies sexual activity should not be taken seriously. The screenwriters for pornography cannot be so stupid. You know, these vulgar narratives of a housewife alone at home, a plumber comes, fixes the hole, then the housewife turns to him, 'Sorry, but I have another hold to be fixed. Can you do it?' or whatever. Obviously there is some kind of a censorship here. You have either an emotionally engaging film, but then you should stop bust before showing it all, sexual act, or you can see it all but you are now allowed then to be emotionally seriously engaged. So that's the tragedy of pornography." (Žižek, 2006)

Moran removes the "activity" and leaves the "narrative" props. The outcome is intriguing as it is much more layered than, let's say, Thomas Ruff's "Nudes" (2003), a series of digitally manipulated pornographic jpges collected on various internet websites. Considered as a whole, Moran's images form the storyboard of imaginary movies, much more graphic and explicit than those eventually produced as imagination always surpasses representation. As such, these images operate both as teasers and mementos. At times, The Armory looks like the IKEA catalog ofBDSM. But there is something deeply lynchian in these haunting images: the abundance of crimson curtains, negative space, leather sofas, and - above all - the threatening, shadowy presence of cameras, which both replace and stand for the viewer's eyes. To look at The Armory is to gaze through a window - or, rather, Windows - of pornography, as "smut" is mostly consumed via computer screens today. The voyeuristic pleasures triggered by The Armory are reinforced by the sensation of having finally caught a glimpse of the subconscious, or, rather, the Subconscious Hotel, filled with generic furniture and stereotypical canvases. Bad Art (tm): a zebra, a portrait of an aristocratic lady, flowers hung on the wall. What does this all mean? Mental note: I am still waiting to read a compelling analysis (a thesis? a book? a photographic essay?) on the presence, roles, and functions of paintings depicted in contemporary pornography.

Located in the Mission District of San Francisco, Kink.com was funded in 1997 by Peter Acworth while he was pursuing his PhD in finance at Columbia University. Today, Kink.com’s headquarters occupy the San Francisco Armory, a fortress withing a city, built in 1912 by the United States National Guard. The Armory’s Drill Court was San Francisco’s primary sports venue for prizefights from the 1920s through 1940s. After falling into disrepair, the Armory was purchased by Acworth in 2006 and is now one of the largest adult production studios in the world. Christina Voros' new documentary, Kink, produced by James Franco and presented at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, explores the deep recesses of this marvelously strange place. Moran and Voros' projects are curiously complementary.